U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) is a long-time watchdog of Defense Department spending, including fixing the broken accounting system within the agency. He released a report on the accounting problems in November 2013.

When he met with now-confirmed Defense Secretary Ashton Carter as a nominee, Grassley emphasized the need to fix the accounting system to identify waste, fraud and abuse at the Pentagon. Grassley made the following comment on the Defense Department inspector general’s decision to withdraw a much-heralded clean opinion on the Marine Corps audit.

“All of the experts, including the inspector general audit team, the deputy inspector general for quality assurance, and the Government Accountability Office, have been saying for months that the evidence in the work papers did not support a clean opinion. The inspector general is right to withdraw the opinion. The inspector general indicates that the opinion will be ‘revised’ and ‘reissued.’ This could mean issuing an official disclaimer that the opinion is not reliable. A disclaimer is the right outcome. Also, those responsible for sanctioning unreliable documents should be held accountable. By law and by common sense, the Pentagon needs to break the habit of relying on bad accounting. Clean, accurate audits are necessary to hold the Pentagon bureaucracy accountable to the taxpayer.”